How to Make and View Your Own Stereo Photos (3D)

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

These days, more films are shown in 3D than in 2D. For a few tens of euros, you can also buy a decent, often cardboard, headset for your smartphone to experience 3D and Virtual Reality. New viewers keep appearing, each with a specific purpose.

To view homemade stereo photos, it is still enough to take two photos next to each other, just as people did at the beginning of photography. Even before photography became known, stereo drawings were being made.

Viewing three-dimensional pairs of photos is a sensation because of the beautiful sense of depth that comes closest to reality. You can easily get acquainted with stereo photos to see what extra dimension you get compared with an ordinary photo. For example, by making one yourself.

How do you make a stereo photo yourself?

1. Keep in mind that you should maintain a distance of 1.75 metres or more from the object to be photographed to your camera. Otherwise, you are in front of the so-called imaginary window, which usually does not produce good images. For example, an arm or a leg becomes much too long when it is in front of the imaginary window


2. Nothing that appears in the image may move between taking the first and second photo. Buildings and statues are always fine, but trees, people, animals and other moving things can cause quite a problem


3. Take the second photo approximately 65 millimetres to the right of the first photo, on the same horizontal line


4. Make sure there are objects spread throughout the image, such as a bush, a post, a pile of stones, and so on. This creates a coulisse effect to indicate depth, resulting in a beautiful pair of photos


5. Preferably do not use flash when working with one camera, because the shadows will not match. And when using a Loreo attachment, the flash does not work on a Nikon D90

Finishing off

Viewing a stereo photo

Viewing one at a time

Even more convenience

With the Canon IXUS 185, the battery is underneath next to the tripod socket. So to charge it, you always have to unscrew the two cameras. Since you can take many photos on a single charge, this does not have to happen often.

There are also attachment lenses for sale. You can mount these on a DSLR with an interchangeable lens. This has one major advantage, namely that the shutter is always synchronised. But you often get a narrow soft-focus edge in the middle of the photo and/or at the edge, which is very distracting.

You also only get an image with the quality of the lenses in the attachment, and that is usually lower than the lens of the camera you are using.

If you view the image above in stereo at approximately 12 centimetres wide, you can see the correct dimensions for the depth needed to draw something yourself. With the 60-millimetre measurement, you reach the imaginary window.

The imaginary window is an imaginary window, so it cannot be seen. But in a photo taken in front of the imaginary window, everything in front of that window is stretched and therefore distracting.

You can draw something, but you can also paste something, though remember the distances between the objects.

Once you have caught the stereo photography bug, you use a slide to move the camera and take the second photo. You can make or buy such a slide, and then you can set it not only to 65 millimetres, but also to other distances.

If, for example, you want to photograph a flower that is 60 centimetres away, you only need to move the camera two centimetres for the second photo.

As a rule of thumb, for every 30 centimetres of distance between the object and camera, you should move the camera one centimetre, up to 6.5 centimetres. To take stereo photos from a very long distance, you can use a longer slide.

With this essay, I hope to have contributed to preserving and expanding the wonderful hobby of stereo photography.

Also have a look at NVvS, the Dutch association for stereo photography.

You might also like

5 comments

Have your say